Maillard's novel, Gloria (1999), was well received in Canada, short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and brought him national attention in the United States.GLORIA by Keith Maillard, starred review, Kirkus Reviews, 1 July, 2000 Maillard also returned to his first love, poetry, and published Dementia Americana, which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada. He became interested in the re-emergence of formal poetry in North America and commented about it in his oft-cited essay, "The New Formalism and the Return of Prosody."Gerry Cambridge, "The New Formalism," Jay Parini, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004), 251, 253-54.Keith Maillard, review of Rebel Angels, The Antigonish Review, 109 (1999).Catherine Addison, A Genealogy of the Verse Novel (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 424. 2000s The last of the "Raysburg Series", The Clarinet Polka (2002), was well received in the United States, particularly by the Polish American community.William Hal Gorby, "Saints, Sinners, and Socialists on the Southside: Polish Catholic Immigrant Workers, Politics, and Culture in Wheeling, West Virginia, 1890-1930," PhD thesis, University of West Virginia (2014), 2, 120, 123, 124, 128, 129, 351, 355-56. It received starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews, and was included in Booklist’s Editors’ Choice ’03. It won the Polish American Historical Association's Creative Arts Prize, and came to the attention of scholars in Poland.Polish American Historical Association Creative Arts Prize Maillard was one of 35 writers placed on the West Virginia Literary Map in 2004 and he was inducted that year into the Wheeling, West Virginia, Hall of Fame. In 2004, Maillard returned to the raw Bildungsroman material first published in The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through and rewrote and reshaped it into the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet, which appeared in four volumes between September 2005 and September 2006. The Toronto The Globe and Mail selected Difficulty at the Beginning as one of the top books of 2006, calling it "a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century."Tom Sandborn, "The '60s on the installment plan," The Globe and Mail, 21 October 2006. Reviewer Richard Helm describes the quartet as Maillard's "magnum opus and the keystone of a literary career that has flown largely under the Canadian radar." He characterizes Maillard as "probably the most famous